


Souls

by Imbroglio



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Gen, OC Sorta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-15
Updated: 2015-07-15
Packaged: 2018-04-09 10:30:05
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,434
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4345076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Imbroglio/pseuds/Imbroglio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve Rogers should have died long ago. Death is patient.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Souls

     She knows now, unlike the first time she stepped into the cramped, dingy apartment, with blankets tacked over the windows and watery potato soup steaming on the stove, what a pain this one will be. She wants it to be like the others. Pale, sweaty skin, or glassy eyes, or perhaps warm blood and jagged flesh, or a seemingly-healthy body dropping dead with no warning. She glides in; she takes the soul and all its life and goes, leaving an empty body behind, maybe a family or a friend that will miss the soul for a little while.

     She wonders sometimes what there is to mourn. But she only sees humanity at its frail, struggling end, when all the worst qualities come out in full force as if the soul wants to make sure to leave all its evil and scum and dismal inadequacy behind. Perhaps humans are different, better, when their souls and bodies are still one, and they can’t feel her hands reaching for them. She wouldn’t know.

     And sometimes she comes on a stubborn soul that refuses to rip those last few stitches, that sucks up against the body’s spine and clings there like a parasite. Those, she has to reach for, to pry away from the body. Those are the difficult deaths. Not difficult for her; difficult for the dying and the ones waiting for them to die. For her, it is just a little bit extra time, out of a limitless vastness that she will never find the end of. She can spare it.

     But this one she has seen before. He does not call to her like so many others do; at the last, humans seem to recognize her as a companion rather than a thief. This one fights her. Several times she has appeared at his bedside, reached for his soul, only to have him take one last breath, then another last, then another, until it is obvious that he is going to continue taking them for a while yet and she might as well go for the next death while she waits.

     This time, though. This time his soul is rattling in his body like a dry cough. He is not in his bed this time; he is bent double in a back alley, and his heart is not beating right, not beating regularly, and from what she has gathered from the impressions the frightened dying leave on her he must be in pain. And he is dying.

     She reaches for his soul. It’s a good one, as souls go. Solid. Heavy. Not with grief, bitterness, but with determination. This one will remain where it is for as long as it needs too, which is why she has had such a difficult time taking it. She holds it, gently coaxing it away from the boy. It doesn’t drop loose into her grasp, but it peels slightly away, enough to give her hope that this is the end at last. Perhaps because the boy is alone, this time; there is no one holding his mortal hand, no one willing him to hang on.

     Then there is. Another boy, whose soul fills his body to the edges of his hair and the tips of his toes. She will not meet this one for a long time; not until his soul has shrunken away from his hair and hands and feet and left them gray and shaking. This boy has no place here.

     “Hey,” the living boy says, bending over the dying boy. “I’m gonna get you home.”

     She follows them, still grasping to the few threads she managed to fray from the edge of the dying boy, but she knows it is no use. His mother and his friend worry about him, but she knows that he will pull through. He will live another day.

     She leaves him in the flickering candle-light, his weary mother worrying over him. She will be back. She has all of eternity to spend, and he has nothing. She can wait for him.

     She sees him at seasons’ changings, when the weather throws him off of the fragile balance he has managed. His mother sits with him, as if trying to hold his pieces together with will alone. She sees him in back alleys, bloody and bruised, ears ringing, squinting to see the fists hurtling toward him—but not to duck. To throw his own punches back. Weak. Ineffectual. Useless. But he acts as if he believes he can change the world one thug at a time, as if he is twice as large as he is and is going to live forever.

     She sees him one spring morning, in a dim, slow rain shower, sitting beside a bed. She takes a soul from his home that time, but not his soul. The soul of his mother. It is slow, soft, like a familiar blanket worn thin by years of use. She expected to take this soul someday soon, but not before the young one died.

     She has other bodies to find, other souls to take. The humans are fighting again; they are always fighting. She likes the fighting. It gives her young souls, still sharp around the corners and bright in the middle, that haven’t had their individuality worn smooth by life and their energies sapped by illness. It gives her souls side by side whose bodies would have never met otherwise. It gives her variety. Even she can grow bored, in peaceful times.

     She almost forgets the boy who keeps living. Then she finds him again, forcing foreign blood or whatever it is they have invented into his fragile veins. The thing he is strapped into was probably not meant to be a coffin, but it will work as one. She takes him, holds on, as the burning liquid drives his soul into her embrace at last.

     She does take a soul that day. But it is not his. He emerges, free of the ailments and frailties that should have killed him years ago, his body and soul bound together even more taut then before, and she realizes that she will have to keep waiting for him. But she will have him eventually. They can’t keep his heart beating forever.

     No; she takes his older friend. Deep, far-seeing; rounded edges, but still sharp in places where she least expects it. He dies by bullet; she savors the surprise and the last, lightning-white flash of hope that he feels as his body falls and his soul breaks free.

     She finds the friend, the full-bodied one who saved the first boy so long ago. He has retreated into himself; he has a burning in his veins, too, but it just keeps burning him from the inside out instead of making him whole again. She prepares to take him.

     The boy who keeps on living gets in the way. Releases the man with the enemy in his blood; steals from her once more. He is constantly robbing her.

     She is patient. She has time. But she has had her fingertips on his life and on the lives he holds dear so many times. She wants to take it all.

     She hovers in their shadows, just outside their vision. She takes her lives and comes back to them, watching them. One misstep, one mistake, and she will have them both in her hands, free of their bodies before they have a chance to tighten their holds.

     She snatches at the boy with the enemy in his blood as he falls. She tears a piece away from him. It goes cold and silent in her hold. She waits beside him, through the long hours when his blood melts the snow and the snow freezes his blood, and he wavers in and out of life. She watches him as his enemies find him, carry him back with them. She waits to see if he is dying, if she can patch his soul back together, but he does not die then. She keeps her ragged piece with her, to return to him when he does.

     The boy with new life in his veins also falls into cold and ice, but through his own choice. He sleeps, but does not die. Not yet.

     She is patient.

     Both are frozen, placed beyond her grasp. But she has eternity, and they must wake up someday. When they do, she will be there. And she will take both their souls, one fractured into two or three or however many pieces, the other grown heavy with grief and determination both.

     She will wait.

    

      


End file.
